ly ready to offer. Baseness
for baseness, she hated the other least: there were even moments when a
marriage with Rosedale seemed the only honourable solution of her
difficulties. She did not indeed let her imagination range beyond the day
of plighting: after that everything faded into a haze of material
well-being, in which the personality of her benefactor remained
mercifully vague. She had learned, in her long vigils, that there were
certain things not good to think of, certain midnight images that must at
any cost be exorcised--and one of these was the image of herself as
Rosedale's wife.

Carry Fisher, on the strength, as she frankly owned, of the Brys' Newport
success, had taken for the autumn months a small house at Tuxedo; and
thither Lily was bound on the Sunday after Dorset's visit. Though it was
nearly dinner-time when she arrived, her hostess was still out, and the
firelit quiet of the small silent house descended on her spirit with a
sense of peace and familiarity. It may be doubted if such an emotion had
ever before been evoked by Carry Fisher's surroundings; but, contrasted
to the world in which Lily had lately lived, there was an air of repose
and stability in the very placing of the furniture, and in the quiet
competence of the parlour-maid who led her up to her room. Mrs. Fisher's
unconventionality was, after all, a merely superficial divergence from an
inherited social creed, while the manners of the Gormer circle
represented their first attempt to formulate such a creed for themselves.

It was the first time since her return from Europe that Lily had found
herself in a congenial atmosphere, and the stirring of familiar
associations had almost prepared her, as she descended the stairs before
dinner, to enter upon a group of her old acquaintances. But this
expectation was instantly checked by the reflection that the friends who
remained loyal were precisely those who would be least willing to expose
her to such encounters; and it was hardly with surprise that she found,
instead, Mr. Rosedale kneeling domestically on the drawing-room hearth
before his hostess's little girl.

Rosedale in the paternal role was hardly a figure to soften Lily; yet she
could not but notice a quality of homely goodness in his advances to the
child. They were not, at any rate, the premeditated and perfunctory
endearments of the guest under his hostess's eye, for he and the little
girl had the room to themselves; and someth